For us, symbol is continuously submerged and revealed by the “mnemonic wave.”⁶²⁶ With romanticism it begins to reemerge from the secret societies—the priests of the Enlightenment had confined it among those ceremonials of Cagliostro and Sarastro. Friedrich Creuzer speaks of the Kabirians. Goethe, the first great antiquarian of archetypes, lists them in the second part of Faust. Johann Jakob Bachofen writes about swamps and tombs. In academic publications—those considered by the most ingenuous men of letters as being remotest from tender existence—thousands and thousands of myths, rituals, fables charged with inexhaustible energy and accumulated in just a few years. Then the furious eruption of interpretation. Schools of thought clash: the Solars, the Lunars, the Astrals, the Diffusionists, the Evolutionists, the Tellurics. They are tribes that proliferate, find their leaders, their sorcerers, their victims. They dream of tortuous migration paths, the rebirth of Blood and Earth, descents from astral bodies, totemic lore, mythological keys. They are struck by trepidation and scruples. A great expert on phantoms understands, with the shrewdness of a Swiss farmer, that he can forgo everything but must speak in the name of science. And yet there is nothing scientific in what he does. Jung writes gnostic apocrypha in private, and would analyze them in public as psychotic documents. He analyzes psychotic documents in public, tracing them back to the vast academic library—still more or less unknown to anyone lower than an assistant professor or Privatgelehrte—in which the myths, rituals, fables had been amassed. He finds connections, and establishes (or seeks to establish) parallels and points of correspondence. He records everything in the name of science. He has found the password that enables him to survive—on every few pages he has to say that the whole forest of the past is a “psychological reality.” And what is God, what are all gods if not a “psychological reality”? With this rudimentary trick, Jung has smuggled hundreds of pages of myths, hundreds of images, from academic libraries into the minds of his patients, his readers. But it was not just a convenient ploy. In its exoteric guise it was the password sought by the world. In its esoteric guise it said something that once again distanced the symbol from the word: symbol as a “psychological reality” became linked to a state of consciousness. And states of consciousness could no longer be traced back, reduced to as many meanings. A state of consciousness can be related to language, but it cannot be replaced by language. Among others, even by this dubious path the symbol was brought back to life.

“… industry penetrates the dream and shapes it to its image, and meanwhile it becomes as fantastic as the dream itself.”⁶²⁷ Sainte-Beuve wrote these words in 1839, commenting on the new phenomenon of “industrial literature.” These are the years when images are turned into a new article of production: advertising. Advertising, the nineteenth-century novel, and the visions of the inventors of patents all grow together, obeying the same impulse. As for novels, they are born from the convergence between “fiction for maidservants” and the “respectable novel” (the latter aiming to raise itself to the “honor of the three-cent novels” espoused by Stendhal: when there are many avid readers, “the director of the cabinet littéraire cuts each volume of the novel in half and loans it out at three cents a day”).⁶²⁸ In the same way that the inherent productiveness of fertile land had once nourished the social body, so now the reshuffling of images left to themselves guarantees an invisible perpetual motion, a background hum in the city. But the change to which images are subjected goes alongside the no less radical change to which industry is subjected: its experimental context now extends to the whole psyche, even before the psyche itself is mentioned. Through osmosis with the new material, industry is equated with the “dream.” The sharp illustrations in the Encyclopédie are no longer enough: behind every craft workshop there is now a camera obscura, ready to shroud the whole of society in a phantasmagoria that knows no crisis of overproduction.